The next Fable game needs a little more time to mature. I guess that’s probably par for the course when you take a traditional RPG franchise and turn it into an RTS hybrid where four adventurers try to take down a fifth player controlling the various evil hordes. It’s a fascinating idea, but needs more time to mature – until Spring, to be precise, after being promised for some time this year.
Who knows if Legends will end up a good Strategy game or good RPG, but we’ve got both covered.
In a post on the official blog, the team sum-up why the delay has occured. While the game has been in Closed Beta for some time, and will be adding another 100,000 folks to it soon, they’re not willing to make the jump to publically available yet. The key difference here is really one of perception – once something is available to all, there’s an assumption that it is somewhat finished, and they don’t want that soft-launch state until they’ve added more features and received more feedback.
Normally I’m all for delays, but Spring 2016 is looking like the busiest quarter in all of video game history, even with the various high-profile slippages. Fable Legends could be lost in the shuffle, already being a bit of an unknown if the Team PCGN chatroom when it was brought up is anything to go by. Normally you’d hope for the brand name to hold up in those circumstances, but next year it will be counter-played by the likes of XCOM, Dark Souls, Mirror’s Edge and Far Cry, all of which are far more present in the public zeitgeist than the long-abandoned Fable franchise.
Still, a good concept shouldn’t be kept down, and it will be interesting to see how the game fares come Spring.